Christmas Advent Birthday Cake

This advent birthday cake idea originated when I saw a beautiful wooden advent calendar house and thought to myself, ‘How cool would this look if it was a cake?’ Luckily my friend was celebrating her birthday on the 3rd of December so I figured this was a great chance to test out my idea!

I set about baking four square 8″ cakes, placing each one on a cake card and ensuring dowels were inserted into each cake to give it adequate support.

The tricky part was deciding how big each advent window needed to be so that they were not too big and not too small, and then to decide how high the cake needed to be.

The squares are made out of fondant icing. I used a cookie cutter to get the size right for my cake which is roughly 1 and a quarter inches. The cutter I used was a rectangle and I just halved it for each box, but ideally a nice square cutter would do the job best.

The numbers and small decorations (of which were brought from a cake shop) were stuck on with some edible glue. Once these had all hardened and set, I used some royal icing to attach the squares to the cake. This can be tedious as the royal icing doesn’t set straight away so be mindful to hold the square in place for a little while otherwise the square may slide off the cake!

Everything is edible on this cake (bar the cake boards and dowels of course!) so it’s great fun for my kids to pick off bits they like! The name ‘Emma’ at the top was made with fondant using a bunting silicone mold. The letters were painted with colouring gel mixed with rejuvenator liquid and attached again with royal icing.

My Christmas shapes around the cake were made with fondant shaped by using cookie cutters.

The baubles on the Christmas trees were small balls of fondant squished flat!

I painted edible glue on the trees and then dusted the area with edible glitter to look like tinsel. I then used a tiny star cutter for the star topper on the tree.

I cut fondant strips to make the snowmen scarfs, cut triangles out for their nose and squished fondant balls flat for their buttons. Silver and gold balls were used for their eyes.

The reindeer antlers and hooves were painted brown to give an extra effect.

Lastly I rolled out some white fondant and laid red strips on top of it, I gently rolled this together and cut out candy canes. You could roll out the white and red fondant into sausage strips and entwine them together to made a 3D candy cane!

Once I had stacked my four cakes, I then baked one more 8″ square cake and carved it into my roof (technically my husband did the carving, but I don’t like to give him too much credit or he will get a big head.